found-art tuesday : the difference between a frog and a toad

I left before dinner last night to host a book group at Malaprop's downtown.

When I got home, I was just in time to tell Tessie a "little girl" story, our nighttime tradition. I tell her a story about a little girl who finds all kinds of adventures in her bedroom when she goes up to sleep at night. We never name the little girl, but we both know it is Tess herself. The little girl opens the door to her room each night and who knows what she will find! One night she fell right into a big bowl of Cheerios the size of her room, using a Cheerio as a life raft while she swam and played. Her parents come up to check on the unusual noises, but when they open the door, they can't see anything except her sleeping in bed. Of course. As it should be. Some nights there is a whole zoo in her room, or a water park with slides as high as the moon, or the world's biggest library, or bumper cars made out of SweetTarts candy.

So I missed dinner last night. Mr Brilliant told me what happened:

"Tess was busy trying to write something," he said. "And getting really discouraged. She hesitated and sighed a big sigh, and wailed, 'I can't even spell it.'"

"Spell what?" I asked.

"She wouldn't say. She just threw the paper across the table. I handed it back to her. 'Spell what, honey?' I asked her."

"Difference," she said.

So he helped her spell it, careful not to intervene, careful to just answer the question she asked. And she continued her drawing as the three of them ate.

When she handed him what she had drawn, I can only imagine him sitting there, shocked, looking at these two circles of difference, and the smaller but important place where they overlapped. This elegant display of logic, of set theory. In a six-year-old package. Of discovery, pure and simple. "It was breathtaking," he said.

Here's what he wrote me about it this morning when he emailed the picture of it to me:

"I've not seen many pictures in my career that show what discovery might look like–this is a ripping  example. It shows the work of a six-year-old independently creating one of the great organizational/logical tools, the Venn diagram, an elegant method of organizing and comparing the qualities of two (or more) entities. I think I can almost follow the thinking that went into the chubby fingers pushing the marker as the thought was being thunk."

This is what discovery looks like.